Too much too young

THE British author Nick Hornby has made a booming career out of masculinity and its discontents. He writes smart, witty novels that make ideal fodder for box-office smashes. His essential talent is the ability to write about guy stuff -- sports, music geekdom, the pursuit of women -- without making anyone feel like a sucker in the process. That streak, I’m afraid, has come to an end.

“Slam,” his new young-adult novel, is told by a 16-year-old kid named Sam, who knocked up his then-girlfriend Alicia and becomes a dad.

There are a few sublime moments in the book, where Hornby nails the fumbling anguish of his hero. “We hadn’t given up hope,” Sam confesses at one point. “It was just a different kind of hope, for different sorts of things. We hoped that everything would somehow sort of maybe turn out not too bad.” For the most part, though, Sam sounds fake, like some older guy impersonating a teen. Hornby gives Sam a skateboard and a poster of Tony Hawk to worship, but he never grants his hero the mind-set of an actual teenager.

Which is why Sam -- despite his hopes of going to college, despite the fact that he’s not especially fond of Alicia and that neither is prepared to care for a baby -- never seriously considers the possibility (even in his own mind) of abortion. Alicia’s motivations are even more baffling. She wails that the baby is “the only thing she’d ever wanted.” But the statement is absurd, histrionic. There has been nothing to suggest any maternal urgency within her. Hornby does make a fleeting effort to portray the grim reality of teen parenthood. “I was going to be something,” an exhausted Alicia finally laments. “I don’t mean something incredible. Just something. And what chance do you think I’ve got now?”

This is the most haunting question the novel poses, but one the author utterly dodges. Instead, his story winds up just the way you’d expect. The young parents struggle briefly, then triumph. They find new love interests. Sam goes off to college. The kid becomes a kind of ennobling accessory. Roll the credits.

The sad thing is that Hornby could have made this work. Sam is himself the product of an unhappy teen pregnancy. Had he been allowed to confront his choices, it’s possible he might have come up hard against his own legacy -- the lost dreams and lean years his parents suffered on his behalf.

But Hornby doesn’t have the stomach for a messy row about abortion. Or perhaps his publishers, concerned about placing the book in high school libraries, suggested he elide the topic. Whatever the reason, the novel never recovers from this essential evasion.

Then there’s the problem of Sam himself. He starts out likable enough, thanks to Hornby’s breezy style, but he quickly proves a poor judge of his own character. “It’s like a disease or something, not wanting to be bad,” he tells us. What’s the next thing this teen saint does? He runs away to a seaside resort before Alicia can reveal the results of her pregnancy test. Here’s how he explains that move:

“You might not feel good about running for your life, but what are your choices? Well, I had walked around the corner, and there was an al-Qaida with a machine gun, except he was just a baby, and he didn’t actually have a machine gun. But in my world a baby, even without a machine gun, is like a terrorist with a machine gun, if you think about it, because [my baby] was every bit as deadly to my chances of going to college to do art and design etc. as an al-Qaida operative.” I’m pretty sure Hornby wants us to see Sam as lovably panicked here. But he comes off more like a dolt, the sort of guy who might give his child to a terrorist in a moment of confusion, perhaps in exchange for a machine gun. Ha-ha.

Nor is this an isolated moment of stupidity. “Alicia said that you couldn’t get pregnant while you were pregnant,” Sam informs us a bit later, “which is why people are never three or four months older than their brothers or sisters, which I suppose I knew, really, if I’d thought about it.”

Right.

It’s not enough for Hornby to treat Sam like an idiot; he does the same to his readers. His protagonist is forever explaining his jokes and insights to us -- and then explaining them again. In his first encounter with Alicia, for instance, he dwells on how skillfully he’s flirting with her.

“You think you’re getting somewhere, don’t you?” she says suddenly. There’s a pleasant jolt to this tart response, until Sam chips in with “I was shocked. That was exactly what I thought.”

Yes, dude, we know. And after a while, this endless iteration made me feel like a sucker -- like a guy Hornby doesn’t think is smart enough to put two and two together and come up with four.

That “Slam” is supposed to be a young-adult novel only makes matters worse. It suggests that Hornby sees teens, and teen readers, as incapable of adding up those narrative twos, let alone grappling with complex feelings and issues. That’s not just condescending, it’s flat-out wrong. Teenagers struggle with intense and conflicted emotions every day. (If you don’t believe me, then you haven’t spent much time around them recently.) Millions of them face unplanned pregnancies. They deserve a book that honors the upheavals of the experience.

Teenagers may not have the adult rhetoric down pat, but they often possess as much emotional insight as their elders, and even more candor. They’re too overrun by emotion to fake nonchalance. That’s what makes a book like “The Catcher in the Rye” so mesmerizing. The narrator is Sam’s age, but he’s wise to the phoniness of the adult world and his own bum heart. He refuses to dumb down his observations or spare readers the depth of his despair. (If that seems an unfair comparison, try “Project X,” Jim Shepard’s excellent 2004 novel, told by a troubled 14-year-old.)

Hornby is a brilliant writer, and he was, after all, a brilliant and troubled teenage boy once. He wrote about those years -- wrenchingly, gorgeously -- in his miraculous memoir “Fever Pitch.” The Hornby of “Fever Pitch” would have tagged “Slam” for what it is: a tragedy posing as a fairy tale.